Why sports talk radio is on the upswing

On the Friday before the Super Bowl, a crowd of about 20 people jostled one another trying to take Vanilla Ice’s picture or get his autograph as he sat down for a Radio Row interview with Nestor Aparicio, the owner of a small Baltimore radio station.

Other celebrities were drawing much bigger crowds in the third-floor JW Marriott ballroom that made up this year’s Radio Row in Indianapolis. It was difficult to move around the SiriusXM booth as Rosie O’Donnell hosted her show. Fans stood about four deep to catch a glimpse of Adam Sandler as he made the rounds to promote a movie.

Still, there was something telling about the fact that a C-list celebrity giving an interview to a small, 5,000-watt radio station would draw such a crowd. It speaks to the craziness of Radio Row, the Super Bowl’s annual orgy of buzz and promotion. But it also speaks to the enduring popularity of radio.

The media world is consumed with the latest digital technology. In radio, that means everything from live streaming and interactive apps to audio and video podcasts. But it was good, old-fashioned sports talk radio — yes, the Marconi invention — that proved to be more popular than ever during Super Bowl week this year.

By almost every measure, sports talk radio, the traditional “stick business,” is going through a renaissance.

“There’s never been more sports radio stations than there is now,” said Dennis Wharton, an executive vice president with the National Association of Broadcasters. “It would be great if former station owners got back into the business with highly localized sports stations. There’s just a tremendous appetite and audience for that.”

The number of sports talk radio stations in the United States has grown by 64 percent in the 10 years since 2002, according to figures from Inside Radio, a trade publication covering the radio industry.

In 2002, 413 stations were sports talkers. By last year, that number had jumped to 677. The number of sports talk radio stations has grown every year for the past 10 years.

“We’ve gone from a time when the industry openly ridiculed the idea of a full-time sports station to an environment where some markets have three or even four all-sports radio outlets,” said Tom Taylor, a radio industry analyst with Radio-Info.com.

That trend shows no signs of slowing down, especially given the desirable young male demographics that sports talk radio attracts and the local nature of sports talk radio.

“Sports talk radio is a local programming platform,” said Scott Becher, an executive with Federated Sports Gaming, who launched a station in Miami. “While other formats tend to be national and more competitive with satellite radio, it’s much more difficult for a sports fan to get a daily fix for their local teams other than in sports talk. Local still matters.”

A recent trend of launching sports talk stations on FM also is fueling growth in the genre. CBS Radio launched its first FM sports radio station in 2008 with WXYT in Detroit. At the end of 2011, 125 sports talk radio stations were operating in FM across the United States, according to broadcast research group BIA/Kelsey.

“The explosion has been moreso, in a lot of markets, AM stations moving their programming over to an FM property and reaching younger and bigger audiences with it,” said longtime radio veteran Tom Bigby, a former executive with CBS Radio. “It opened up a brand-new market on FM. That’s a lot of the reason why we’ve seen the explosion of sports radio because it migrated to FM, where a lot more people were.”

There are several reasons why more people are launching sports talk radio stations these days. It’s popular with the desired demographic of young men. And its live format makes sports talk radio a safer buy than music formats that have been hurt by streaming apps like Pandora and personal devices like iPods.